Are We Any Closer to Being Able to Afford to Eat Lab-grown Meat?

In a decision, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the sale of meat from bioreactor cultures — in other words, that has not been obtained through the slaughter of animals — subject to the approval of inspections of the products, laboratories and production facilities of the company concerned, procedures which are expected to be much simpler than obtaining a license to sell the product as such.

But the company, UPSIDE Foods, still has a long way to go: its products, like all those in this sub-segment of the industry so far, have been produced in very small batches, at very high cost, and tested only by volunteers who signed a disclaimer. Now, they must be able to scale up production, reduce costs to compete with the product they are intended to replace, and do so under the watchful eye of an FDA that has no intention of taking risks in this area. For the time being, UPSIDE lacks production capacity beyond laboratory scale.

In December 2020, another company, Eat Just, was licensed to market synthetic chicken meat in Singapore, then partnered with a restaurant to sell it at gourmet prices, and is in the process of building the largest production facility in the market. UPSIDE Foods was the first company to gain such approval for the U.S. market, a benchmark for regulators in many other countries.

At the moment, UPSIDE’s projections do not portend any significant change in the market: the idea is to sell cultured chicken at about $17/lb, which would be far, far more expensive than the slaughtered meat currently available. That would make the product basically a treat for people with with qualms about consuming meat that involve animal cruelty, but predictably, the company has few ambitions to go much further. Lowering production costs is seen as a long but not impossible process, since the economics of cell culture tend to be, in some respects, exponential rather than arithmetic.

Other initiatives point to the cultivation of beef, pork or salmon cells. Some predictions estimate 2040 as the year in which most of the meat we consume will not come from dead animals, an achievement that would have an impact not only on the ethical question raised by obtaining our food from the death of other living beings, but also on the environment. Undoubtedly, a change of habits on a scale impossible to imagine today. But human societies have experienced, over time, many such changes, and the doubt, in many cases, has not been the change as such, but simply the time required for them to take hold.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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